This invention relates to the control of odors within a home or a house and to a new and novel means of timing and actuating the disbursing of an air freshener so as to provide the maximum effective freshening of a scent or perceived odors within a house at a minimum cost and use of air freshener.
It is widely known that enclosed spaces, especially homes in which many activities take place, have a tendency to gather distinctive odors, some of which may be unpleasant. It is also a known physiological fact that the human sensory apparatus adapts to the environment in which it is located. Thus persons who have been in an area for a certain period of time, unless the odor is particularly foul, will not notice any odors in that area; their noses have adapted to the environment in which they sit. A person entering the area for the first time, such as a guest and the like, will instantly notice odors that the inhabitants have masked out.
The recent emphasis in home construction upon energy efficient homes and upon environmental and energy savings have resulted in the construction of nearly airtight homes; very little air circulation now occurs between the inside and the outside of the house, especially in a house of new construction. As a result, the collection and holding of normal household odors is magnified in new construction housing and the sensory impact upon a person entering the house for the first time can be severe. As a result, a number of odor masking or odor dampening aerosol sprays of commercial design had been developed.
These sprays, in general, are in the form of pressurized aerosol can dispensensers. The pressurized can contains a liquid form of the air freshener under a gas pressure. The can is also provided with a mechanically displaceable spray valve and spray head, normally of a unitized plastic construction approximating that of a pushbutton, which serves the twin functions of releasing the liquid and forming it into an aerosol spray.
It is of course extremely inconvenient, and highly unlikely, that a person in the household will keep a can of such spray at all times for periodic spraying in the air whenever a guest or the like arrives. Thus a number of inventions and prior developments in this art have concentrated on the providing of a mechanically timed air freshener release. These air freshener releases are in the form of can holders which will take a standard aerosol can together with an electric motor actuated cam operated button depressor mechanism which periodically depresses the spray head on the aerosol can causing it to emit the spray through a hole. It should be obvious that this type of timed device utilizes a constant expenditure of air freshener and is essentially independent of the arrival of guests or other persons entering the house from the outside.
The effect of such timed releases is in fact the opposite of that which is often intended. The human sensory apparatus reacts to changes in the odor patterns much more strongly than the consistent monitoring of an existing odor. Since it is highly unlikely that at any spray of the timed air freshener a guest has entered the room, what is more likely is that the inhabitants who have become used to the normal room environment are instead being exposed to periodic pulses of a scented air freshener. This can produce a cloying effect as of being exposed to too much of a sweet or perfumed odor and can over time become an offensive an effect as the room odors would be to one entering from the outside.
For this reason, a separate development in the art of air freshener dispensers has concentrated on developing air freshener can holders which are mechanically actuated by the opening of a door when a person enters a room. Two major problems exist with this particular development.
The first, which has been noted in the art and is the subject of several developments in an attempt to overcome, results from the requirement that such a device must be mounted on or adjacent to a door so that it may be actuated by the opening and closing of the door. It happens that the standard sizes and shapes of doors commonly in use in American households is such that the typical mounting for such an air freshener is at face height or a little above face height. This can result, especially in the situation where one person opens a door from one side to admit a second person from a second side, in one of the two people being sprayed almost directly in the face by the air freshener.
A second problem is that the spray occurs simultaneously with the opening of the door. An air freshener is most effective when it has been sprayed and has been given a short period of time within which to disperse within the air within a room. Both its odor masking and odor absorbing or odor neutralizing properties will then have had time to take maximum effect. By comparison, an immediate spray of an air freshener without time to disperse will produce more of a concentrated perfume effect without actually freshening or eliminating the perceived odors within the room.